Immigration IS decided by the Elite. Make no mistake about it. Multikulti is being PUSHED ON US. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18519395 That guy is an unelected Goldman Sachs/BP/EU/UN/Bilderberg shill. And their goal is to undermine homogeneity and push immigration and multiculturalism. He says it right there in the open. I have no idea why this link isn't being reposted by the alt-right into oblivion.

>>is not decided by moneyed interests, but is simply yet another article of faith of the Cathedral<< It's both. The moneyed interests of the elite are the articles of faith of the Cathedral. Whatever the elite wants to be right, is made right by the Cathedral, that's what it's for.

Notice that under any conditions the problems don't fix themselves. Regardless. Notice "they" whoever they are - shy not from their task. It doesn't look easy because they're professionals, it looks easy because they have the field to themselves. Fixing the Problem would require the dreaded work, which is of course a prole task, however the Proles would need Tribunes. That might just be you, and that would involve not only work...but...would require...courage. Even if the proles shoulder most of the burden. Let me offer my very humble contribution to the bounty of talk: The Dark Realization. The moment when you realize it's your Watch. [Watch doesn't mean Voyeur to Life's struggles]. It's our Watch. So if you are confronted with "pure distilled evil" that further wants every inch of every mile ...?

[...] Spandrell on ethno-nationalism. [...]

I sometimes toy with a little model of how these things come about. Generation-1 wants end E2, but can't be explicit or overt about it given the social circumstances of their time. They come up with a strategy. They will pretend to care about, and publically extoll, end E2, the most socially acceptable goal available. But end E2 is actually the means to achieve E1 eventually. Not exactly a secret conspiracy, but through the left-spontaneous-political-coordination mechanism, everybody's in on the inside joke. No one in Generation-1 really cares about E2, some might even, privately admit they think it's harmful and costly. But E1, boy, that gets your salivating, that might just be worth it. And if E1 is something like permanent one-party rule, then because power is option value, you can always convince (or deceive) yourself that you'll have the capacity and authority to play clean up. Generation-2, on the other hand, was never 'let in on the joke'. They learned E2 as a fundamental religious moral principle, and they grew up in a world where Generation-1 maintained a framework where not supporting E2 was a shaming offense worthy of ostracization and excommunication from polite society. They believe. As Moldbug wrote recently

I also except those, several of of whom I know, who grew up as rationalists but have made a rational decision to convert to orthodox religions, the mustier and more arbitrary the better - generally because the alternative more and more proclaims itself, per Chesterton, not nothing, still less Reason, but the Whore of Babylon in full professional attire. To these friends, Babylon-worship, essentially idolatrous (and speaking to Maimonides' point that idol-worship is self-worship) seems unsatisfying for a grownup, but utterly unacceptable for his children. But still - these people are not genuinely religious, though their kids will be.

The Cathedral's kids are now the Cathedral. And with regard to E2, once just a scheme, they really believe it. Generation-1 probably wouldn't have approved of that, but there was nothing in Generation-1, no limiting principle, to inoculate against E2. So E2 is the goal, and, except for a few cynical pols, E1 is genuinely seen as a kind of a 'happy coincidence', or 'enlightened self-interest'.

Here's another point against the plutocratic hypothesis. The idea of "cheap labor" as a major motivator for the political activity of businessmen is, while not completely irrelevant in practice, still blown way out of proportion. Businesses in the modern managerial, semi-communized state have an infinite array of options for rent-seeking, and it's naive to suppose that they'd expend the bulk of their influence on this one major ideological battle -- rather than concentrating on much more petty and obscure, and yet far more easy and profitable venues for milking government cash, restricting competition, regulatory arbitrage, etc. Think about it: as we speak, there are exorbitant sums of government cash being helicoptered to well-connected businesses under all kinds of pretenses, lavish profits made by (de jure or de facto) state-chartered monopolies, and whole classes of businesses given such brazen privilege for shearing the public that they can be seen as de facto tax farmers. Now, in this situation, imagine a businessman figuring out how to boost his profits by playing politics -- and instead of grabbing as much as he can of this readily available stream of rent-seeking cash, he instead gets the brilliant idea to spend money and time fighting the most radical ideological battle imaginable and struggling to turn the entire society upside-down, all this in hope that his payroll costs might fall by a few percent at some distant point in the future! There are indeed some special situations where it makes sense for particular groups of businessmen to lobby for cheap foreign labor, where the process is straightforward, quick, and directly related to their industry -- e.g. the Silicon Valley lobbying for more temporary visa programmers, or farmers lobbying for more foreign fruit-pickers. But it's completely naive to extrapolate this into some vast and general plutocratic open borders conspiracy, or to believe that this is a major part of the forces behind the current Cathedral consensus. Real big business players have far better ways to profit from politics, and spend the their time and money on those.

It's both the capitalists and the Cathedral. The capitalists no longer have a sense of noblesse oblige, so they can do some amazingly destructive stuff in the pursuit of short term profit. Did you ever read the story of Postville, Iowa? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/magazine/postville-iowa-is-up-for-grabs.html?pagewanted=all&\_r=1& Orthodox Jews buy meat packing plant in tiny town. The native whites won't work there as the wages and conditions are too bad. Russians and Ukrainians are brought in, but they quickly move on for the same reasons. Illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans are brought in, but eventually the factory is raided by immigration and the Mexicans and Guatemalans leave. Native Americans (Amerindians) and students from Kyrgyzstan are recruited but they quickly quit due to the low wages and bad conditions. Micronesians from Palau are flown in from 8,000 miles away, arriving in shorts and flip flops. Somalian refugees and homeless people from Texas are brought in. Eventually the owner of the plant goes to prison for bank fraud and the Paluans end up on the street with no money, no way to get home and no where to stay. The story closes with the plant open under new management, a town full of Somalian refugees and the locals wishing that the illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans were still around. You wouldn't think that it would make sense for capitalists to fly in Micronesians from Palau in order to avoid paying a decent wage and maintaining a safe clean working environment. But it happened.

I don't think it's safe to go 'S Europe = disaster' --> 'nationalism failed to arise' --> 'nationalism dead'. Just look at Spanish bond yields. (By chance, I know more about Spain than Italy.) Spanish employment levels are completely *. Money was flying, ripping, tearing itself out of Southern banks, according to Bass, even as the EU dons celebrated their latest beautiful accord a couple months back. So I conclude, despite my want of economic sophistication, that the Spanish and Italian bonds are being propped up somehow. The whole countries probably are, more or less. Probably even more pervasively than we know about, or at least more pervasively than I personally am able to understand. But Greece finally became un-prop-able, and what do you see? Ethny. Will ethny come to rule Greece? I dono. Would Greece be bombed by America if they tried to explicitly institutionalize ethnic power? Dono. Will Spain stay prop-able? Dono. Can EU's brezhnevian 'artists' defuse a debt bomb which is, after all, only a bunch of paper (silicon 01010010001110010 actually) and a bunch of people who are really angry about what it says on the paper? I guess I'm just saying, who the hell knows?

> The essential feature of this transformation is that the domestic proles are being pushed down, until they no longer enjoy any undeserved hereditary, accident-of-birth privileges over Third Worlders. So the members of domestic elites are in fact setting themselves up for a far worse fate in case they experience downward social mobility. This seems to contradict your theory flat-out. Where would a fall from riches to poverty be a worse fate — in Japan or in Mexico? Yes I agree utterly. Most here will be acquainted with at least a dozen elite or elite-ish or at least prosperous people over 55, perhaps some dozens. So just think of them. How many of their kids are boozy, depressive, kinda boozy/depressive, are single mothers, or generally got a lot of problems and not much money? A minority, but a substantial minority. And their kids' kids? Gonna be incrementally worse, again, than the kids.

> Well as Vladimir said, given that there is no clear example of some obviously superior place outside the system where Ceaucescu isn’t applauded, there is no real reason to pause and think. Jim suggests England's real consumption actually rose since the restoration in 1660. I've actually seen comparable claims for W-Europe at large, going back way before 1800 . . . to more like 1500. I'm sure it grew maybe 1.5% way back in the day, nothing like the 4% you see in America over at least ~1870 - 1990 (minus the 30s) -- still. So an interesting question is, suppose no real cataclysm happens, but consumption is -1% per year. --As it apparently has been. That could represent an inflection point after . . . 5...0...0 flipping years! OK, oil production has been flat, whereas I can't begin to imagine NEA demand hasn't been rising rapidly and won't continue to rise rapidly, so considering that and other factors (racial change leading the list), suppose we soon shift to -2.2% -- ? 0.978 ^ 20 = 0.64 for that matter, 0.985 ^ 25 = 0.685 Whoops! Problem alert! This will mess up society, bad, even if there is no point where things just go bananas. Do you really need a Ceaucescu to cease applauding for, if and when the above happens? I say no. Try looking at 50-150 photos of Afghanistan from the 1970s. There's nothing you can do about the endless visual, statistical, and narrative documentation of the West at its econo-technical height. For me this says Vladimir should greatly moderate his feeling that disciplined, sharp, and freethinking men are at the helm in any real numbers. My hypothesis is more like, only a few Davos Men answer that description. One of them, Thiel, up and quit lying. Actually he already started talking pretty real a long time ago, but somehow became and remained hyper-elite. So, there are maybe three others that decided it was better to stay inside and stay quiet. But in general the Cochran picture is far more true: we have idiots. 20 years is not a long time -- and you know, caveat caveat caveat -- as disciplined guys we've made them ad nauseam -- robotics may bail us out, blah blah. But maybe not ; it's obvious that the above models have at least a fair chance of taking place. So why are we betting our entire civilization at all, staking everything, when we just plain don't have to -- just make a few simple changes, merely shore up the very basics -- and when it is simply not possible to be master over all the imperiling trends? Take a step back ; when have sagely, disciplined, or merely highly savvy men behaved this way? Savvy good, savvy wicked -- or just savvy all-too-human, yet still savvy for all that? They haven't, therefore these hypothetical savants don't exist. Weirdos and decadents and fools and the unsober have acted like this. Now, as for embryo selection, think about the lag time for its payoff. OK, now notice that the IQ (and probably Conscientiousness) variance between sibs is a large fraction of the variance in the pop at large (ie, US Whites, US Mestizos -- not that these are perfectly endogamous pops). By the law of large numbers, that tells you the phenotypes are mostly determined by relatively few alleles of large effect. (Otherwise sibs would be closer in these traits. If IQ were determined by 800 flips of a single unfair coin, two sibs would have very similar IQs. The fairness or unfairness of the different coins represents the fact that IQs of parental couples vary.) It follows that these determinative alleles must be rare alleles, otherwise they would have been discovered already. This is possibly not an ironclad syllogism, but I think its pretty close. Dealing with all those rare alleles is going to be extremely hard, and anyone can understand why: you have 10,000s to millions of very rare alleles, virtually all of which do nothing, they are fitness-neutral or virtually so. So, good luck finding the ones that matter ; it may take ten years longer as compared to a common alleles scenario, or it may take 40 years longer -- or it may take only ten years but the power of selection is only 0.25 what you would get in a common alleles scenario -- or whatever.

"It’s all bureaucracy and game theory." And Marketing. Yes the steering wheels off, it was quite obvious in Iraq. I will add inertia to the above. For the game or indeed the despair of reaction to play out requires eternal passivity amongst the main target group. There is no reason looking over the last 50 years to assume that's not going to continue indefinitely. EXCEPT that it already...isn't. Now if your the game theorists and bureaucrats we've actually GOT as opposed to whatever we'd like to have, *they don't realize this yet except dimly*. The sudden hysteria about tool control is the long suppressed and in their case selected out reptilian survival brain sending out warnings ...which are poshed away. Poo Poo. Silly M'uricans and so on... Understand your cognitive elite self-selected in WW2 for - cowardice. Said trait was reinforced and indeed bred into generations from 1940 to 1973, with a strong impetus [fear/survival] to keep selecting out physical bravery...or indeed labor. Oh sure they were smart...BUT...that wasn't the motive. Military Service - including Conscription periods - also runs in families. It was the Fighting Sullivan's, not the fighting DeSturgess-Smythe-Vespulas-Patricius. Ah, no. And the military has been self selecting and indeed intermarrying from the same pool for 40 years now. For both populations there's also the intersection of nature and nurture - the family - to consider. So smarts is chosen over...survival and fighting. Except that is was actually - cowardice. Using smarts as a tool. One might get the idea that this would produce...spawn of ever weaker character, regardless of their test scores. Gee I guess that's great if nothing goes wrong with your high equilibrium fantastically leveraged on fiat status. However when your not primarily breeding smarts - as you were led to believe - but breeding shirking...you could end up with elites that however smart [smarts they were using to shirk, not produce the enlightened reign of philosopher kings] you could end up with a truly degenerate bunch not fit to run a bath. And they aren't fit to run anything. That is patent, even if my pet theory of one of many reasons why isn't patent...

If I wasn't clear I was referring to the Draft Deferment for the Cognitive Elite to shirk either danger or labor. Yes the New Deal set the Table...but WW2 was the banquet, and still is...a shotgun wedding of Mr&M__ Cognitive-Elite wedding banquet. Prior to WW2 they wouldn't have dared utter or write such nonsense about their brains being such a strategic asset that they could not be risked in war. Nor did they during WW2..this all came after you see. Prior to the Atomic detonations the Brains weren't at the time they came to be in the Official Mythology. WW2 is also the beginning of the term "grunt" as in "can only grunt yes or no" to refer to Infantry and other unfortunates..who were you see considered under technocratic government lower status by even much of the Military - who picked the smarter soldiers and Officers for other Branches - and that was the case until Vietnam enshrines the Grunt.

It’s not mere “socialism” as some would have it. It’s multi-cult fascism: Take from the producers to give to the centers of multi-cult wealth and political power. Here’s how it “works”: 1) Confuse people about the distinction between “wealth” and “income”—probably the worst single political economic crime possible to commit in public discourse and one of which the wealthiest man in the US, Warren Buffett, is guilty. 2) Progressively tax income while claiming you are taxing the “wealthy”. 3) Respond to all of the pathologies you create in this confusion by a proliferation of public sector “fixes” that eventually result in the public sector overtaking economic activities by “virtue” of its taxation of all economic activities. 4) Allow the truly wealthy, whose property rights would disappear in an instant in the absence of government protections, to continue to accumulate net assets without limit and without paying the costs of protection of those property rights—shifting them onto the heavily taxed producers. 5) Continue to increase the overall taxation of producers until the goose that laid the golden egg, the middle class, is dead. 6) Decry the profligacy of the middle class as it ceases to have children hence family values, and goes into the abyss of usurious debt, the economy collapses due to a failure of consumer demand and the government centralizes even more power by handing over even more wealth to the creditors in exchange for equity stake.

We interrupt the despair with some good news - at least if you appreciate Nick Land's Lure of the Void - Now This: Bechtel in Space. Now they're serious. When we're really Serious - Halliburton in Space. http://www.planetaryresources.com/2013/04/bechtel-partners-with-planetary-resources-for-space-initiative/?utm\_source=NewSpace News Issue #95, May 2013&utm_campaign=NSN-1&utm_medium=email

> “capitalists” do lots of things, and I don’t believe you want to decide whether to support them (or some of them) unconditionally. Read Finnbar's latest on utility-transfer 'capitalism' -- fantastic. Read all his essays, he's a heavyweight, as is Peter Frost.

Vladimir your hard skepticism on macro contrasts with your sense that the EU (and Yank and Jap?) crises can be easily defused. It would appear to present a dichotomy unless you think, like Finbarr, that it's mainly a problem of reaching a suitable political accord and that there exist adequate means for softening the inflation that must take place. I don't think Kyle Bass feels that way. The relevant Finbarr piece is 4 or 5 essais down, maybe I will re-read it in a few hours. I'm going to provisionally take Bass over Fin, and so proceed from trichotomy to the dichotomy I perceive in your thoughts. Off the top of my head, I seem to recall most hedge funds not performing so well under average circumstances. So I'm going to provisionally play it like this: --few people can beat the market hard (Bass is probably one of the few) -- I'll accept your view that most academic macro jocks would just go get rich if they possessed real insights (as opposed to a body of elementary and widely-understood knowledge plus a mastery of imponderable questions) -- and I'll decline your view that the crises are easy to defuse.

It's both - cathedral and capitalism. Capitalism is driven to improve profit. Cheaper labor is the path of least resistance for improving profit and will thus be chosen when there is a choice. In the past national capitalism shut off that option forcing capitalism to innovate instead thus creating vast amounts of technological innovation and real growth which benefited the whole nation. Regulatory capture by the plutocrats ended national capitalism allowing capitalists to take the easiest path - and thus by extension setting in motion the beginning of the end of innovation imo. Also once a ruling class has defected from the people they become like a colonial power and divide and rule as deliberate colonial policy goes back to roman colonia where cohorts of retired legionaries would be planted as a colony in conquered terriotory the same way Somali colonia are being planted in midwest towns.

I will not deny that foreign students can be bright, but faculty exaggerate their brilliance because foreign students are servile in doing work and favors for faculty and not demanding that professors actually earn their tuition keep. Moreover, faculty like that foreign students are either afraid, complicit or morally ambivalent about the immoral behavior of professors. In many cases they are more likely to share the professors’ anti-Americanism than American students. These ass kissers are absolutely not entrepreneurial, and they take the most bureaucratic and least innovative jobs.

[…] I am pretty comfortable following my instincts and blaming the plutocrats for trying to transform rich countries into Brazil in order to enjoy the feudal lord lifestyle. But everytime I’d do so, the whip of neoreaction Vladimir would come by and strongly argue against it. See an example: […]